Project 365: Second Week Complete, Only 50 more to go!
This week we stayed pretty close to home until the end of the week. When there are not many "exciting" adventures happening it can be a challenge to make your photos interesting so I try to find different ways to make my everyday life a little more interesting and stand out. This week I shot from different perspectives, playing around with composition and framing. I also used my wide angle lens, an old Sigma 15-30mm lens that I picked up for a little more than $170 on ebay, it has been a great find. I have used it four out of the seven days and it is kind of a cheat for me to make a photo a bit more fun and different with its wide angle perspective.
Day 8/365 Hide your snacks because this kid will eat them up real quick! 😂😂 Here she is asking for one more cookie!
How many of you struggle with your kids wanting to snack all day, I'm sure most of you. I am dealing with this now. We try to have healthier options, but sometimes I give in to that sweet face maybe more often than I should. Luckily she does like her apples, grapes, carrots, strawberries almost as much as she likes cookies.
When I saw her peeping from behind the pantry door I knew this was going to be m shot of the day. This photograph just makes me chuckle and the way she asked for that extra cookie was so funny too. I love when they make it easy to choose my photo of the day.
Day 9/365 This kid has had it pretty easy these first few days back at school, there hasn't been much school! He was only at school for a good hour and 40mins when I got an email and text message telling me to basically come and pick up my kid. The district was closing because we had some dangerously high winds in the area. Luckily my house didn't get any damage unless you count the mess inside from my little tornadoes!
So this photo came about while the kids were taking turns jumping on the couch. Before this they were just jumping up and down normally while I sat and watched them from the floor. Then my son decided to experiment with "tricks" he called them, double jumping, canon balls, and grabbing his feet in the air, I think this was the feet grabbing shot. He had done this a few times and I'm just snapping away, but this one stood out to me. Of course it didn't look like this in the camera, but I knew I wanted to play around with it in Lightroom and Photoshop to make it into what I had envisioned. The angle of view also makes this image more pleasing to my eye.
I've learned my style and it has pretty much become dark/contrasty edits, so I will usually underexpose my shot in the camera to give me a base for editing. I will not go through my editing process right now, but I will say that my favorite layers in PS are gradients and levels. I do most edits in LR, but I always start in PS.
Day 10/365 The only exciting thing that happened today was walking the dog 😂
Here is a perfect example of what I described above, making an everyday adventure look more interesting. So I had two options for myself, bring my longer lens and get a shot that had the background out of focus and have my subjects stand out, which is usually my go to choice or use my widest lens which I had been having fun with the last couple days. The widest lens was my choice because of the cool wide angle perspective and I knew I wanted to have the environment apart of the image, it helped to tell the story and visualize the surroundings.
This shot was one of the last shots I took as we were walking back home. I actually tried to set up this shot, but you've heard the stories of working with children and animals, they do their own thing, but that isn't always a bad thing. The first thing that drew me to this image was their shadows, but that sky was the second. I notice because this is a wide angle lens you get a natural vignette around the edges of the frame, which I usually add to my images anyway. Because of the vignette it seems to help keep my skies nicely exposed when I use this lens and that helps me during my editing and I don't have to mess around with the sky as much trying to recover it because of over exposure, being too bright.
Day 11/365 I love to watch her play. She has a great imagination.
Here we are playing Trolls...again. She loves to reenact the movie and she gives me lines and sets up the scene. It's a pretty big production.
I focused on framing to add a little interest to this photo. I shot through windows of the dollhouse, I shot from above and this was one of the last shots and ideas I had. She was perfectly framed between these two houses and my wide angle lens made the houses look bigger than they were. I also used my speed light/external flash on top of my camera to get the lighting nice and bright.
Day 12/365 When you leave a 4 year old alone with a bowl of popcorn and the next thing you know there is popcorn everywhere!
Trying to teach them young how to clean up after themselves, they forget most times. She can't really handle the larger vacuum so I pull this kid friendly vacuum out for the littles to use. As you can see she wasn't really trying to clean her mess, but she eventual cleaned a bit of it up.
Here I used my trusty wide angle again to include the surroundings and add context to the story.. I also used my external flash because it was quite dark in the living room and using the flash allowed me to use a lower ISO and add nice lighting to this image.
Day 13/365 Creating a moment in unexpected places
Today was a busy day out and I had my camera with me of course, but not until the end of the night did I get the shot I wanted. Outside waiting for my husband, my son was looking in, in the most focused way. I saw a glimpse of his reflection and hoped that he stayed there until I dialed in my settings. It was late and the only light source I had were the store lights. I made sure to expose for his face because that was the important part of the image. My ISO was pretty high, 3200 which leads to grain or noise in which I wasn't a huge fan of until recently. I think grain in the right situation can give a photo character as long as it's not too blotchy. In this photo it does work. I just love a good reflection shot so you may see more of them this year.
As for editing I knew I wanted a cooler temperature edit because it was night and it reflected the environment accurately. When editing like this I usually play around with the white balance and the blues in Lightroom. What I do struggle with when I edit like this are the skin tones because you want the skin to look natural and not too blue so you will also have to find ways to balance it out.
Day 14/365 Play time after the hike. You would think they'd be too exhausted to play, but maybe that's just me. Here it is almost 11pm and I still hear little voices upstairs wide awake!
We met up with a few friends to have a little hiking adventure at Red Rocks Canyon in Colorado Springs. I think we took off around 11am and finished up about 230pm. When hiking with children you know there are going to stops and exploration, so expect to be out a while. This little lady did so well though she had a little friend there so she wasn't the only little girl so I think that helped her to keep going. It was also a lot warmer than the last few times we hiked so i'm sure that was also a factor. We ended up letting some of the kids in an area I don't think is meant for kids, but they took over.
The sun was shining so nicely, little puffs of clouds were out and the mountains were the perfect backdrop. I knew they were going to head over to this seesaw type contraction so I just waited towards the back so that I could get her in the frame perfectly. She had a great day playing with friends, getting outdoors and just having a fun hiking adventure and this was a great end to the day and week. It still didn't tire her out though.